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Transcript
[00:00:00] Stephanie: Your favorite SEO plugin gives you some control over how your content appears on Google, but what do all of these options even mean? Let's chat about it. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you had a wonderful summer break, and that if you're heading back into the classroom, that your transition goes smoothly.
[00:00:31] I love being able to find the rhythm of a new school year, especially the challenge of coming up with systems that make life easier as we navigate new extracurricular activities, homework routines, and all of that other fun stuff. Looking at this from the blogging angle, I know there are systems and tools that we've put in place to make our lives a bit easier as well.
[00:00:57] One of those common tools that we all use is an SEO plugin, like Yoast or Rank Math. These plugins provide insight into how well we're optimizing our blog content. However, there are other features in these plugins that we often overlook in our quest to just get the blog content out the door. So this month we're going to look at some of these check boxes and fields and other features that we might not be using because frankly, we don't even know what they mean. To simplify these episodes
[00:01:32] i'm going to focus on Yoast with most of my terminology, but the tips that I'm sharing are applicable no matter what SEO plugin you use. For this week's episode, we're going to start with the search appearance section of Yoast. So when you're writing a new blog post, scroll to the very bottom, you'll see the Yoast features in all their glory.
[00:01:55] And the first thing you'll see is the search appearance section. And then in rank math, it's off to the right hand side. There are three major components in this section that you can use to adjust how your blog post appears in Google search results, and we're going to talk about these three components and how you can make the most of these features.
[00:02:17] First up is the SEO title. Now, this isn't the title that shows up at the top of your blog post that you fill in before you start writing the text. That is your post title. So instead, the SEO title is what actually shows up in Google search results when that particular URL is ranking. The SEO title is what shows up.
[00:02:40] Now it is common to keep the post title and the SEO title the same, but you can definitely adjust the SEO title to make it a little more snappy or clickable. When you're in this section on Yoast, you'll notice that the SEO title field has these little gray boxes, and they say things like Title, separator, site title.
[00:03:06] These are called snippet variables, and they are just a shortcut that Yoast provides to make it easier for you to adjust your SEO title. Let's say that your blog post title is a little bit long. You could decide to take off the name of your site from the SEO title, and you would just delete that little gray box that says site title.
[00:03:29] You can also delete all of those gray snippet variable boxes and just type in what you want the SEO title to be. And so now that we know how to change it, the next question is if it's necessary to create a unique title just for SEO purposes. If you're being mindful of your focus keyword and you're putting thought into a clickable blog post title to begin with, then you can probably just let your SEO title default to the post title that you've already come up with.
[00:04:04] But you might decide to use a separate post title and SEO title if, let's say you're doing a series of some kind. So you might want the title at the top of the blog post to show that it's part of a series, but you don't think that that's going to be a very clickable title in search results. And so that's an example of when it might be worth it to adjust your SEO title a little bit.
[00:04:31] A task that's actually on my own to-do list is to adjust the SEO title of the podcast show notes that I have on my website. Now, these basically blog posts are created automatically, but then I plan to go in and beef them up like a more traditional blog post. Now the title automatically includes the episode number, and I don't mind that,
[00:04:56] but I know that it makes it a little bit less clickable in Google search results. And so once I start actually blogging for this business a little bit more, I'm gonna go back in and adjust my SEO titles to something a little more clickable. Now, moving on to the next field in the Yoast search appearance section, we have a spot where you can adjust the slug.
[00:05:19] This is something you can do in the blog post settings itself, but it's helpful to have the reminder in the Yoast plugin that it's something you want to address for each post. Just as a quick review, the slug is the part of the post URL that comes after your website name. And it defaults to the blog post title that you type in at the top of the page when you're writing the blog post.
[00:05:43] So it's essentially just adding dashes between the words in your title. Let's say you write a post that's titled 10 Engaging Morning Work Ideas for First Grade, the slug would be automatically generated as www.yourblogname.com/ten-engaging-morning-work you get the idea it's really long and you want your slug to include your focus keyword, and that's about it.
[00:06:14] So in the case above, you could change the slug to just morning dash work dash ideas. And you could even include dash first dash grade. Way shorter than the default post title. You also don't need to include the little filler words in your title, like the and for. Google is smart enough to know what the focus of the post is without those words.
[00:06:45] And again, as one last reminder, this is something that you can take care of in your blog post settings, just off to the right, those menus on the right hand side. You don't have to take care of it in the Yoast plugin, but like I said, it is a helpful reminder that it's in there and the plugin. So when you're going through the different Yoast things before you hit publish, it just reminds you that you want to adjust your slug before you schedule that post to go live.
[00:07:15] The final part of the search appearance section is the meta description. I think that filling in the meta description is simultaneously, if this is possible, one of the most underrated and overrated SEO tasks in blogging, and I'll tell you what I mean. The meta description, if you're not familiar, is the little snippet of text that shows up below the blog post title in search results.
[00:07:41] It gives you a little idea of what the post is about before you click on it. And I think it's underrated because a lot of people just kind of phone it in when they're filling in the meta description or they skip it completely and they're fine with just letting some random snippet get chosen. Or they might just write a basic sentence with the target keyword 'cause they know that's important and then they move on.
[00:08:07] They don't think too much about whether or not it makes people want to click on their post, and they might just think that it's for Google. On the other hand, there are some people who stress too much about the meta description. They might get to that point in the finishing touches of their post and just decide to take a break because they just can't even think about writing anything else at that point.
[00:08:32] And the reason you can worry too much about your meta description is the simple fact that Google doesn't have to choose that snippet of text to show in search results. I would say most of the time Google picks whatever they want from the page in order to support user intent. But it's still important to fill it in because the meta description does give Google good information about your post, and you are showing Google what you think is important in that piece of content.
[00:09:06] And then also the meta description can encourage people to click on your post if it does show up in search results. But remember that it will often not be what Google ultimately chooses to show in the search results. So don't sweat it too much, just fill it in with something engaging in case it does get shown and make sure it uses your focus keyword for SEO purposes.
[00:09:34] But what you do not ever want to do is leave it blank. So to sum it up, it's important to check in on the search appearance section of Yoast. When you're writing your post, scroll on down to that first section and take a look. None of these boxes are going to completely make or break the SEO of your blog post, but it's helpful to think about what your posts are going to look like in search results, because at the end of the day, you want your blog post to stand out on Google and encourage people to click and read more.
[00:10:11] It is nice to have this section in Yoast that allows us to take a minute and think about those search appearance elements. If you're excited to chat about the other commonly skipped sections of Yoast., be sure to follow the podcast so you don't miss the next episode.